Day off and first day I understand something!

My university card for Irkutsk!

Wednesdays are apparently my day off (study day...) whilst I'm here. Not particularly good considering that most other people on my corridor have to go to university anyway, leaving me with nothing to do! However, today I had to sort out the payment of the obshegiteye - forgive the awful transcription for the word 'dormitory', which meant going into the bank and talking to native Russians. Fortunately Jacob was also at a loss of anything to do, so he and I both went together. We left fairly early (9am) and it didn't take us long to get there. I then went to an ATM and managed to withdraw (to my surprise) 5.000 roubles.
However, after that I'm assuming that RBS cottoned on to the fact that money was being taken out from abroad and therefore temporarily froze my account. Fortunately, managed to find a bank which had Western Union (MDM, the same bank which the university banks with), and was able to withdraw the sum of 35.795,26 roubles. What followed was a lot of paperwork, and running between the university and the bank several times, and ended with me having to pay the university 27.000 roubles (and the bank 100 roubles for transaction) for the accommodation for a whole year, and then a further 6.013 for renewing visa, visa invitation and being picked up at the airport. meant I ended up with only 8.000 of the roubles which I had at one point!

After I got that all sorted, we went to the foreign relations office and asked IY to change our courses a bit - I asked to be put into an Russian class at an easier level, and we both asked for French classes - hopefully this'll mean that I have all my lessons with one person. In between these affairs, we went to the 'mercado Chino', what I assume to be the central market in Irkutsk - they have a lot of things there and its expected that you barter in order to knock the price down. As soon as they hear English being spoken, however, they knock the price upwards a fair bit... We met Juan and Luís there - Juan, as ever, was haggling to get the price down to the amount of money he had for a pair of jogging bottoms, and eventually, with the help of some Russian friends of theirs, managed to get it down to a bargain price. We looked at the hats, but decided they were too costly and probably made of fake leather, so we decided against this in the end...

Back at the dormitory, I read a bit more of A Game of Thrones, and tried, albeit with limited success to talk to the internet men who came. I also went to the MCD bureau with DS and CH to buy a mobile phone - anyone who wants to know can send me an e-mail / facebook message or something and I'll let you know it.

First Borsch (second helping)

Today was obviously quite a good day as far as studies were concerned. Got up at about 9:00 - 9:30, as did AB - he has no lessons early on a Thursday, so he had is lie-in. Managed to get in the shower before the hot water went (reason as of yet unknown) and had quite a peaceful morning. KR missed her first lesson so went to the uni with CH and myself. Once there we all went our separate ways, and I went to my first lesson in the new group, glad to find that I was in a group with Jacob, Juan, Luís, CH, Brenda (Canadian), and six Koreans whose names were just a bit hard for me to remember. The teacher is a lovely old lady whom I would say was in her seventies who took the lesson quite slowly so that we would all understand - I got a fair deal more vocabulary written down and learned a lot more grammar in this lesson than I had learned in the previous class! That lesson lasted for four and a half hours with two breaks of fifteen and ten minutes after each hour and a half. We also finished early (we usually finish at 18:10), and the homework appears to be easy, although I haven't gotten around to doing it yet. Juan, who was feeling ill, left early, and so the other four of us came back to the dormitory together, although not before Constantin, a Russian who is studying English and Spanish asked us to go out for a drink with he and his friends (we said we might go tomorrow, so we shall see...)

Danya and Katrien, 'sisters'

We got home and went to the supermarket, although I bought nothing as we still have quite a lot of food (Maria and I are now putting money together to buy food, as we've started to cook together anyway so that she can have a meal ready for me when I get home at seven-ish during the week). Today, however, she had no need to cook, seeing as Aliona and another girl, Eugenia, had agreed to cook Borsch for us! The seven of us currently on this corridor (see photos on previous posts), Juan, Jacob, Luís, Amanda and three Germans all went up to the top floor to share in this feast, which was very good indeed - I had three servings, all with smetana, the Russian word for sour cream. We then went on to play a game of 'Mafia' - for those of you who don't know it, just check the rules online, its fairly simple to follow, and they have now come down to my corridor, well, quite a few of them, I don't really know who's here, they're all in Maria's room at the moment as I finish typing this (started the post a few hours ago and now feel bad about not finishing it). Again, photos were taken, and will promptly go up once I can be bothered to take them off my camera, Aliona's camera, or anyone else's camera for that matter.

Just as a note of interest, I finally got around to shaving last night and also have now got AB to wash and iron a load of my t-shirts - its the first time he's ironed, so he's very excited about it. Still need to find a proper washing machine though. Apparently there's a large paying washing machine not that far away, so we may do group clothes washes, grim as that may sound!

Oh, also, our 'bus' almost had another crash today - typical.